


The Act of Looking

by vulcansmirk



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, Post-Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-04
Updated: 2019-01-31
Packaged: 2019-10-04 00:39:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17294363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vulcansmirk/pseuds/vulcansmirk
Summary: The thing is, Brian dreams sometimes. Not often, but when he does, it’s always the same: he’s in a forest, drenched in sunlight and shimmering with errant motes of strange, luminescent plantlife; there’s a ramshackle little house, aging, but well-loved; there’s a perfect square of sand surrounded by stacks and stacks of multicolored tiles; there’s a woman, sometimes, and more often a precocious little boy who shares Brian’s wide, gleaming eyes; and there’s a man, gazing down at Brian with an affection born out of both trial and time, certain, old, familiar.This stranger looks exactly like the man of Brian’s dreams.





	1. The Observer Effect

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be a short little drabbley flail into the Magicians universe, and suddenly it became my version of events for season four. Oops. More tags to come as I conjure up more plot.
> 
> My science may or may not have fallen prey to symbolism. I make no apologies.

_Eliot is no saint. He does, however, have the patience of one. Granted, it’s been known to falter—a certain ignominious night under the influence of both intoxicants and emotion magic comes to mind—but on the whole, Eliot is reasonably certain that when he dies, and they plant that shining, ichorous, ominous-as-fuck scale in front of his face, it will err more toward the side of the feather than the heart._

_He knows this, of course, because he’s miserable. Even when he’s happy—even when he’s a king, with money and power and a hot royal fiance and a reason to exist beyond the tedious necessity of regaining consciousness periodically because his body refuses to remain stationary no matter how hungover—he’s miserable. And he’s miserable because, despite having all these wonderful, whimsical things, his anthem is still the most annoying and on-the-nose song by the Rolling Stones. His life is full, but his heart is still missing a tiny, niggling, infuriating piece, like a loaf of bread that he’s put in the oven without scoring the top to let the air out. His proverbial bread loaf has a perpetual fucking air bubble in it._

_He knows what will fill it, of course. He doesn’t need a fucking Truth Key to show him how Quentin thrums, plush and verdant, in the center of every room, somehow throwing everything around him just the tiniest bit out of focus. He doesn’t need to feel anew the fresh, stinging burn of Quentin’s too-wide smile upon seeing him again, and he certainly doesn’t need to be standing there, joints aching with the memory of fitting snugly around Quentin’s familiar form like goddamn puzzle pieces._

_Eliot doesn’t need to be told how he feels about Quentin. He been knew._

_So he brushes right past that particular truth, pretending, as he has become so adept at doing, that there isn’t still a piece of him latched firmly onto Quentin’s threadbare T-shirt as he lets his eyes slide away. Seeing Penny turns out to be the important part, anyway, so whatever._

_But this fucking quest. Q keeps harping on the fact that a quest is supposed to transform the quester, make them a better version of themselves. Eliot knows he isn’t perfect—whiny baby God-bitches, does he know that—but as far as he’s concerned, he’s just fine the way he is, thank you very much. He’s off the booze now (mostly), so shouldn’t that count for something?_

_The Keys, it seems, have other ideas._

**

“The conclusion we’ve drawn from the double-slit experiment—and I sincerely apologize for the headache you’re all about to get—is this: the photon exists as a discrete particle at both the beginning and the end of its journey, but during its transition from Point A to Point B, it acts almost like a wave. More specifically, it seems to contain within it some knowledge of all the _potential_ paths it could take, and it exists at each of these potential positions simultaneously. As it comes into contact with the board, the particle sort of _decides_ which discrete position it wants to occupy at the end of its journey, taking into account the likelihood of each position relative to its interrupted journey through the slits. This simultaneous knowledge of all their own potential outcomes causes a series of discrete photons to strike the board in the same interference pattern they would create if they were released all at once, in one big wave.”

Brian can feel the goofy grin threatening to yank up the corners of his overwide mouth. He contains it, barely, meeting the blank, hungover stares of his students with his own eyes gleaming.

He allows himself a quiet chuckle. “Hurts, doesn’t it?”

He mimes an explosion with his hands at either temple, complete with unconvincing sound effects. Several of the miserable teenagers before him visibly stifle their groans.

Brian dispels both the convoluted concept and the constricting cobra of his own embarrassment with a single wave of his hand. “Here’s the point—and it’s actually sort of beautiful, if you think about it—see, light can’t really be controlled. It does what it wants, goes where it wills. You can try and separate it into its component pieces, but you can never fully erase the memory of where those pieces belong. They’ll always find their way back.”

Most of Brian’s students continue to blink up at him, unimpressed. But more than one face goes slack with a kind of nascent awe. It spurs Brian on.

“Why do they do this?” Brian wonders aloud. “No one really knows. But the prevailing theory—hang onto your hats, kids—is that the act of measurement itself, of _observation,_ forces a particle that exists in multiple realities simultaneously to manifest itself in a single reality. The act of looking itself changes the very fabric of the universe around us. By observing our reality, we create our reality.”

The awe is contagious; Brian watches it spread across most of the faces in the class, some reluctant to show it, but none fully able to conceal it. This is how Brian knows he’s done his job.

“That’s it for today, I think,” Brian sighs, expressive hands finally dropping to his sides. “Go home, get some sleep. And maybe think about bringing some aspirin to class on Thursday.”

A chorus of sliding and scraping rises throughout the room as Brian’s beleaguered students slouch gratefully from their desks. When the last baggy-eyed undergrad has filed from the room, Brian remains where he is. He stands as still as he can and considers the assemblage of vacant seats before him. He curls his toes inside his shoes, grips the scuffed linoleum beneath, and tries to feel the universe’s infinite potentiality teeming in his lungs as he fills them up.

It’s there, he thinks. Distant, though. Somewhere beyond the emptiness of this room.

He stops by the bookstore on his way home. He needs a couple more books for his thesis, plus one for the class he’s set to teach next semester. And, if he’s honest with himself, he just needs the comfort of that familiar atmosphere: musty volumes jammed onto rickety wooden shelves, towering in precarious stacks to form meandering aisles. Brian has never had much of an imagination—he was always very practical, even as a kid, focused on what he could see, hear, touch, observe. He’s never been much for fiction or poetry. He colors inside the lines, stays on the garden path, feeling no particular temptation to stray from it. His Ph.D studies in quantum mechanics have broadened his horizons a little, though; as it turns out, there’s some scientific evidence to support the theory that there are worlds beyond the one Brian knows. He’s always loved being around books for the tantalizing reminder of all the world’s knowledge he has within his grasp, but now, he’s beginning to love it for all the new worlds he can feel buzzing between the pages. Brian’s reality always feels just a little bit less empty inside a bookstore.

It almost makes him forget to be awkward as he’s jostled by the shop’s other patrons, or to stumble as a pretty woman Brian instantly classifies as out of his league fails to step out of the way as he tries to squeeze around her on his way out the door.

Brian is so distracted daydreaming of other worlds, he probably wouldn’t have noticed the man calling him a name that’s not his own, except that the man barrels right into him.

“Quentin!”

The tall, shaggy-haired stranger lays an elegant hand on Brian’s arm, looking at him with such intensity, such relief, that Brian instantly feels like he’s been shoved under a microscope.

“I found you,” the man says, breathless.

“Oh, uh—” Brian struggles not to throw up his hands too wildly in front of himself, seeing that he’s holding a mostly-full cup of coffee in one of them. Instead, he offers the stranger what he hopes is a placating smile and starts to edge around him. “No, sorry, I’m—I’m Brian.”

The man’s hand falls from his arm, the delight from his face. But instead of embarrassment, what replaces the man’s delight is affection: certain, old—familiar.

Brian pulls up short.

The thing is, Brian dreams sometimes. Not often, but when he does, it’s always the same: he’s in a forest, drenched in sunlight and shimmering with errant motes of strange, luminescent plantlife; there’s a ramshackle little house, aging, but well-loved; there’s a perfect square of sand surrounded by stacks and stacks of multicolored tiles; there’s a woman, sometimes, and more often a precocious little boy who shares Brian’s wide, gleaming eyes; and there’s a man, gazing down at Brian with an affection born out of both trial and time, certain, old, familiar.

This stranger looks exactly like the man of Brian’s dreams.

The pure _knowledge_ bubbling in the man’s eyes practically scalds Brian’s skin as he says, “Do a card trick for me, Quentin.”

Brian snaps back into himself. He doesn’t know any card tricks. He doesn’t know any Quentin. He forces a laugh, floundering.

The man’s expression turns plaintive. “Come on,” he pleads. And then Brian’s skin goes cold, because he watches tears well up in the stranger’s eyes, and then the stranger whines, “Will you play with me?”

It’s this frankly disturbing show that finally allows Brian to dismiss the man’s intensity, and his resemblance to Brian’s occasional nighttime conjurings. This is clearly just another case of the New York crazies.

“Um, sorry,” Brian stutters, sidling away along the wall, books clutched tight to his chest. “I think you’ve got me—mistaken for somebody else—but, I, y’know—”

He doesn’t bother to finish the thought, scurrying down the road as quickly as he thinks he can without being too blatantly obvious about trying to escape.

The constant glances back over his shoulder probably give Brian’s game away, but he deems them necessary, because the stranger is still following him. He’s slow, carrying on with a light, unhurried saunter, tearful desperation replaced with a discomfiting calm. Brian picks up the pace.

As Brian turns a corner, the stranger’s form slides from view. Brian shuts his eyes, sighs his relief.

And then leaps clear out of his skin when he faces forward again and the man is right there, a hundred feet from where he was a split second ago.

Brian doesn’t typically like to curse, but—what the _fuck._

“Don’t be scared!” the man says, to absolutely no effect. “This is great! There’s _so much_ for us to do together.”

Brian looks around frantically, because really? Did no one see that?

But no, they didn’t; no one is watching—in fact, suddenly, Brian can’t see a single soul around.

He swivels back to face the stranger, stomach dropping like a rock. “Uh—”

“I can’t wait to get started,” the man continues gleefully. He stalks forward, grin widening, unfurling his arms and wriggling his fingers in chilling anticipation. “All the people who deserve our wrath…”

Wrath? Jesus, who _is_ this lunatic? Who does he think _Brian_ is? There must be some mistake, he’s sure of it—there _has_ to be—

“Uh, please, I’m not—” He holds up his hand, defensive, useless, and whips around desperately one more time, praying someone sees his distress. But no one does.

“This is gonna be so fun,” says the stranger, closing the distance between them. His hands find Brian’s elbows, and he looks Brian square in the eye. “I think anything is more fun when you do it with a friend.”

And then his eyes flash crimson.

Brian’s quick, sturdy, orderly brain collapses in on itself all at once. This isn’t real. This _can’t be real._

He wrenches his arms out of the man’s grip, starting to stumble back. But he just reaches out again, undeterred, and wraps too-gentle arms around Brian’s paralyzed form.

And then they’re gone.

Brian can’t see. Everything is black. For a single, terrifying moment, he wonders if he’s dead.

Then he realizes he’s just curled up against the strange man’s chest, trembling. He lurches away.

The man—the _thing_ —laughs.

“It’s okay, Quentin!” the thing says. “I brought you home, that’s all.”

Brian blinks, then whirls around. He’s in an apartment, all right, but it sure as hell isn’t his.

As though it can read Brian’s mind—Jesus, can it _read Brian’s mind?_ —the thing interjects, “Oh, that place? That’s not your home. This isn’t either, really, not anymore, but I haven’t quite figured out how to get in there yet. Soon, though.”

Brian plasters himself against the wall, glancing around once again. They’re in an empty loft, the walls dove grey, the floors oak brown, the darkling twilight pouring unencumbered over the room through the huge windows. Something twinges in the back of Brian’s mind, like static shock. His mind reels from it instinctively.

The thing considers him, gaze suddenly razor-sharp, smile flickering.

“You don’t remember,” it says finally. “Oh, Quentin, what did they do to you?”

It slinks toward him, and Brian tries to back away, but he’s moved back as far as he can. He’s helpless as the thing crowds into his space, eyes raking over him, boring into him.

And he can _feel it,_ like a physical thing, like a ruthless diamond-tipped drill skewering his brain, searching for something precious. Brian whimpers.

Pressure, pressure and pain—and then relief, slight, but enough. Brian rises slowly from the lightless depths.

“I see,” the thing murmurs. “Oh, I see. Oh, no, this won’t do.”

The nimble fingers of one hand find Brian’s temple, and then he’s _screaming,_ because it’s _drilling,_ drilling down, down to the core of him, exposing heat and light and feeling and God, it’s unbearable, but it’s so warm, _so warm_ —

Abruptly, the thing steps away. The drill pulls out. Brian’s jaw snaps shut. The silence rings around him like a fucking bell.

When he finally finds it in himself to look up at the thing, it smiles beatifically back at him.

Its voice is warm and slow like the magma Brian can feel fading back into the deepest parts of himself. Eyes flashing, it says, “Now will you do a card trick for me?”

And Brian is about to say no. He’s about to say fuck you, you fucking psycho creature _thing,_ my name is _Brian_ and I don’t know you and I don’t know any fucking card tricks—but he stops.

He didn’t know any card tricks. But now, suddenly, he does.


	2. The Volunteer Tomato

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As of one week ago, this fic is officially AU. Still, I hope you'll all indulge me.

_If Eliot’s honest—which he rarely is, even with himself—it began the moment he first saw gawky, geeky Quentin scurrying, awed and a little frantic, across the violently green late-summer Sea._

_He’d already resolved himself not to get attached. Chances were, this admittedly adorable young magical hopeful would be booted back to Brooklyn before the sun could kiss the tops of the trees, doomed to a life of dull, heteronormative tedium in the unensorcelled doldrums of the Real World._

_The instant he heard Quentin had passed his entrance exam was the final nail in Eliot’s coffin. (Frankly, it’s a wonder it took so long.) He went immediately to tell Margo, trying and failing to keep his cool as he eagerly recounted the tale of his meeting what he still stupidly assumed was just his latest first-year conquest. Eliot would have liked to believe he’d successfully concealed the extent of his infatuation, but even he, actual certified King of Bullshit, couldn’t sell that lie. He knew Margo could see it; there was very little, after all, that Margo couldn’t see._

_Almost as quick as the manifestation of Eliot’s… ugh…_ feelings… _was the realization of the daytime melodrama unfolding between Quentin and Alice. By all accounts—aside from the persistent voice in the back of Eliot’s head that held that no one was really totally one hundred percent not-queer—Quentin was straight, and Eliot had wasted quite enough time on straight boys in his life, thanks. He was ready to forget the whole ill-begotten thing before anything got begot._

 _It would be a whole fucking lot easier if Quentin would stop_ looking _like that—so… vulnerable. Tender. Credulous. Occasionally spine-tinglingly dangerous. And had the light at Brakebills always been so goddamn crystalline, or did Quentin just have a penchant for sitting in the one window at the Cottage that sent the sun’s rays shattering like glass through that ridiculous mop of hair?_

_Whatever. Eliot moved on. Margo, enraged, blindsided, demanded to know what made Mike so different, and Eliot didn’t have the heart to tell her that it was nothing, really, except that he wasn’t Quentin. For whatever Ramforsaken reason, Mike wanted him, and to tell the truth, his obsession with a certain floppy-haired, doe-eyed supernerd had started to ferment into something skin-crawlingly creepy, especially given that, underneath all the angst, he and Quentin were actually becoming friends. In fact, against all forseeable odds, Quentin was quickly becoming one of Eliot’s best friends. All of which meant that Eliot needed to get this stupid crush out of his system, which meant getting laid, and liked, and other L-words Eliot carefully avoids thinking about lest he burst into flames._

_Thanks to Mike, Eliot was completely fine when Quentin and Alice came back from Brakebills South reeking of hetero sex. He was fine when he could hear them fucking in Alice’s room from two floors away. He was fine when Quentin proceeded to make an even bigger idiot of himself professing his love for Alice._

_He should have known it wouldn’t last. Daddy always said Eliot didn’t deserve any L-words._

**

Alice waits what feels like an eternity for the Dean to come around, but he finally does, just as she knew he would. A week after she tells him about the Monster, he slips her the key. She’s gone by the next morning.

The key brings her back to her parents’—to her mother’s house. She quietly slips inside without announcing herself, telling herself it’s pragmatism and not cowardice that drives her to avoid a confrontation with her mother. With magic returned, Stephanie has redrawn all the architectural enchantments in the house, creating an early-20th-century English country estate version of Alice’s childhood home that is completely unrecognizable. She tiptoes around the cavernous wood-paneled monstrosity for a full twenty minutes before she finds her old room. Stephanie has left it completely untouched. Alice tries not to overanalyze it.

She changes out of her Library-issue prison jumpsuit, packs some more clothes in her old high school backpack (complete with buttons and iron-on patches of the various late-aughts emo bands she favored at the time), and collects money from the stash she always kept inside a hollowed-out book on her bookshelf. (Her parents were no fools, but she knew they were so steeped in the world of magic, they would never think to look for her precious things in a mundane, non-magical hiding place. Given that she no longer has access to the rationed magic supply, Alice is obscurely grateful to her younger self for her almost clairvoyant powers of forethought.) She considers indulging herself with a shower, but deems it too risky.

Something considerably more risky, but well worth the risk, is sneaking into her father’s study. She has to find it first, but working from her internal microfiche of movies set in World War I, she’s able to do this without much difficulty. It occupies a place of some prominence and equal privacy on the ground floor; the outer doors are tall and narrow and dense, stately, like the entrance to a throne room, or a tomb. Inside, however, it looks much the same as it always did. This, too, Stephanie has left as found.

Which means it takes Alice less than thirty seconds to home in on her quarry, a safe in a cabinet behind the desk, and even less time for her to crack the code and pull it open. (The code is the six digits of Alice’s birthday.) Inside are a number of ancient magical artifacts, important pieces in her father’s historical magic research. Alice ignores all of them except for a gaudy gold ring set with an enormous, chunky white stone—a Roman artifact designed to conceal the wearer from a god by emitting a low frequency of magical energy, counteracting the effects of locator magic much like a set of noise-cancelling headphones. While the ring never really worked for its intended purpose, for Alice’s purposes, it will do nicely.

Problem one: getting out of the Library’s prison—solved. Problem two: gathering supplies—solved. Problem three: hiding from the Library—solved, for the moment. The ring will keep them in the dark for the time being, but it won’t hold for long. They’re bound to find a way around its limited protections soon, which brings Alice to the next problem on her list: gaining covert access to the world’s limited supply of magic.

Alice has a hunch about this one. She slips out of her mother’s house as silently as she entered it, and heads for her next target.

**

Janet sees weird shit sometimes. Well, okay, that’s a given—she _is_ a New Yorker. A scary skinny twenty-something rocking a pair of fluorescent booty shorts and a truly breathtaking array of goosebumps roller-bladed by her this morning as she ventured out into the crisp November chill, herself sensibly swathed in a luxurious red wool coat and cashmere scarf; click-clacking her decisive way toward her office, she carefully avoided making eye contact with a pair of women on the sidewalk as they lobbed increasingly spirited and creative insults at each other (and Janet was definitely using _that_ one later), and she passed not one, but two homeless men masturbating in the middle of the street. None of it fazed her—she’s seen it all before.

But Janet sees weird shit sometimes. Like, _weird_ shit. Like, if-she-told-anyone-she’d-be-thrown-into-a-padded-cell-to-rot-for-the-rest-of-her-life shit.

It’s a strange kind of double-vision, like watching a 3D movie without the shitty plastic glasses on. In one eye, she sees the world as it is: boring, predictable, ordinary. In the other, she sees… well.

She sees ghosts, sometimes: translucent phantasms drifting along among and between and through passersby on the street, haunted faces staring mournfully out at her from random windows. She sees doors where no door should exist, and they open into places they couldn’t possibly lead—from a grimy Manhattan alley to a barren, storm-torn seashore; from a deserted hallway leaden with late autumn chill to a packed street in a city just beginning to shrivel in the ruthless summer sun; from a bustling subway platform to a gleaming field of grass, a massive old house wavering like a mirage in the distance. Sometimes, Janet looks at her own reflection in the bathroom mirror, and on her head sits a crown of ragged red gems, like the teeth of a well-fed predator. Looking at them, she feels as though those teeth might be her own.

She once saw a figure across Fifth Avenue. It disappeared and reappeared erratically, flickering like a faulty fluorescent light amidst the thick rush-hour traffic. In one eye, it was a man, tall, dark hair, a little worse for wear, and her bones felt magnetized at the sight of him, drawn toward this strange man as naturally as breathing. But in the other eye…

In the other eye, it was a void, a man-shaped tear in the fabric of reality itself, sucking heat and light and everything down into it. It made the hair on her arms stand on end.

Janet is a New Yorker, which means she’s seen most shit before—and if she ever sees something new, she’s savvy enough to know when to cut and run. She hasn’t seen the man since.

This, she’s seen before. It happened last week with the Uber driver who picked her up from the airport—he had two faces, one superimposed on the other, but the other shone through like a beacon. A glimmer of recognition lit up her brain for an instant, but she wasn’t about to hold up a pitch meeting over a hallucination of some bozo she blew in high school or whatever.

Now, there’s a woman standing in the middle of her office, and her form is like a shade, a gossamer curtain of grating falseness laid overtop something else. Something familiar.

But this woman is batshit insane.

“For the last time,” she grits out, “I’m _Janet,_ and you’re _not welcome._ Get the fuck out before I call the police.”

“Margo, please—”

She’s got the receiver against her ear before she can consider reconsidering, if she were the type to do that sort of thing, which she isn’t. “Sophie? Hi, yeah, I’m gonna need you to—”

A sharp _crack,_ and the line goes dead.

Janet yanks the phone away from her ear, stares at it. What the fuck?

She looks back at her unwanted visitor just as her hand returns to her side.

“Listen. To. Me,” the woman rumbles, and her voice is almost a whisper, but it sends shivers down Janet’s spine. “I’m Julia. You’re Margo. Whoever you think you are, you’re not. Your memory’s been wiped, but I need you to remember right fucking _now,_ because we’ve got a big fucking problem and we need the High King.”

Janet is about to argue, but the words wither in her throat.

“High King?” she repeats, and god, she _hates_ how unsure she sounds, but really? What are the odds that two people in as many days would call her a monarch of the wrong gender? Granted, one was a freaky, flamboyant ram/human chimera that came to her in a coke-fueled fever dream, but if anything that just makes this more creepy.

“Yes, High King. I know it’s confusing, but there was an election, and—listen, we’re wasting time.”

The woman who calls herself Julia rummages in her pocket for a minute. While she’s distracted, Janet inches her hand toward her purse.

Julia looks up just as Janet whips out her taser.

“Don’t you fucking move,” she warns lowly.

Instead of fear, what falls across Julia’s face is annoyance. She rolls her eyes.

“You just need to hold this key,” she says, proferring said key toward Janet—an antique-looking burnished gold number with a toe-tag dangling from the end.

Julia makes to approach the desk, but Janet springs to her feet, grip tightening on her weapon.

“I said _don’t move.”_

Julia just sighs. “Well, you haven’t lost your fighting spirit. That’s probably a good thing.”

She raises her hand, makes a quick, complicated gesture with her fingers, and swipes at the air like a windshield wiper—

—and the taser flies from Janet’s grip.

She watches it clatter against the wall, eyes wide. “The _fuck—”_

And then Julia is right there, right in front of her, behind the desk, even, staring unblinking into Janet’s eyes with more purpose than she thinks she’s ever seen in anyone. Her face distorts like a mask of funhouse mirrors, and Janet thinks—but no, that can’t be—

“Hold this,” Julia says, soft, and presses the key into Janet’s hand.

And then she _sees._

**

For Brian, the world is not hostile. It holds no evil intent toward him—it holds no intent at all. It is a void. Merciless, emotionless, wild; the universe tilts inexorably toward entropy, a hurricane stirring, inchoate, and if he’s lucky, Brian will get caught in its eye.

That’s the most he can hope for. He is an instant, an electron in the atom of the molecule of the cell of the organism of reality, too insignificant to bear thinking about. And knowing how turbulent, how violent existence can be for some people, he counts himself lucky to have led such an uneventful life. Most of the time.

Sometimes, the monotony of Brian’s life snaps at his ankles. The void yawns beneath his heels, and he wonders idly what it would be like to let it catch up to him. Swallow him up. He wonders whether he would even leave a ripple passing through.

This is generally the point where he pours himself a drink and passes out.

But Brian is wholly unprepared to cope with actual _events._ Like, for instance, a crazy man-shaped monster with unbelievable reality-bending abilities kidnapping him, teleporting him to an abandoned loft, digging into his mind, and pulling up memories he can’t remember making.

The thing asks him to do a card trick. He does one. It asks him to do another, and he does that, too. He’s got what feels like a thousand of them in his brain now, surging in through the tiny hole the thing poked in the hull of his psyche. Brian’s ship is sinking, he can feel it—but the more useless bits of sleight-of-hand stream in through the cracks, the more the cracks widen, the bulkhead eroding, gallons and gallons of some other life pouring in.

Brian gets flashes. Flashes of people; friends, he thinks. Flashes of warmth. Flashes of something he dares to call belonging. Flashes of this man, this thing, but bright—full, and smiling.

“Another!” The thing claps its hands and jumps up and down. “Another!”

It stands against the empty kitchen island, staring at Brian excitedly from across the room. Brian sits on a couch on the other end; the thing somehow manifested a sparse set of furniture—it didn’t order it, it _created_ it, weaving rippling threads of thin air together into corporeal matter, to Brian’s absolute bewilderment. After a short-lived period of blissful unconsciousness on the spare little twin bed in the other room, Brian was hauled back out into this: sitting on a stiff, overmodern sofa, turning tricks for a madman.

As the thing across the room considers him with flashing, fathomless eyes, an idea blooms in Brian’s mind, roots burrowing down to kiss the magma on the far side of his world. It is terrible; dangerous; irresistible.

He lets his hands fall to his lap, deck of cards settling in his limp fingers. He screws up his face in a look of frustration. “I don’t think I know any more,” he says. “I think that might be it.”

The thing abruptly stops jumping. “No more?”

Its eyes narrow, zeroing in on some essential part of Brian that he has no conception of. In the space of a blink, it travels from the opposite wall to the spot right in front of Brian’s nose. He can’t suppress his flinch.

The thing doesn’t bat an eye. In fact, Brian can’t remember the last time he saw it blink. It holds his gaze, searching, unrelenting—and it isn’t the same look, isn’t the same feeling, but it’s the same face, looking down from the same height, and Brian has dreamt about this half a hundred times before: a dark, steady gaze, raven curls tumbling over a pair of high cheekbones, a Mona Lisa smile tugging at a tantalizingly pink mouth.

“Strange,” the thing hums, snatching Brian back from his dreams. “You don’t remember, and yet you do.”

Brian didn’t think it was possible, but the thing leans closer, hot breath clouding against Brian’s lips, and this, too, is achingly familiar.

The thing’s brow furrows.

Its long neck coils around Brian’s face as it sniffs his skin. Its breath warms Brian’s ear. “What was he to you?” it asks. Brian is torn between terror and a visceral kind of attraction.

“Who?” he responds, praying his voice doesn’t tremble.

“Him,” the thing says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

It leans back, gestures toward itself. Brian just shakes his head, uncomprehending.

The thing rolls its eyes. “God, I have to do _everything.”_

It reaches for him, and the last few lingering bubbles of breathable air burble out of Brian’s head. The void rushes in, and his ship goes down.


End file.
